Saddam's mad scheming did him in
In the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, there had been great concern about what kind of "scorched earth" tactics Saddam Hussein might deploy against the U.S. military. U.S. News, for example, outlined some of the "Six Deadly Fears"that America might face, such as chemical or biological weapons, a bloody last stand in Baghdad, torched oil fields, or civilian human shields.
But only one of the six fears materialized: "Once Saddam is ousted, Iraq descends into chaos."
Of course, it is clear now that Saddam didn't have any WMD, but Saddam's failure or inability to mount more of a defense has puzzled many experts.
Now, three years after the invasion, there are some intriguing new answers in a study by military experts who had access to many former officials in Saddam's regime, along with their files. The research was conducted by the U.S. Joint Forces Command to create a better understanding of the inner workings of Saddam's regime. In an excerpt of the findings being published in the next issue of Foreign Affairs, the researchers conclude that Saddam failed to prepare sufficiently for war because he was convinced the United States would never press all the way to Baghdad–and because he vastly overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's security forces.
Saddam was counting on his allies like France and Russia to block an invasion, while he also believed Washington would be unable to swallow the kinds of casualties it would take to reach Baghdad. More fundamentally, all of his planning took place under the assumption that his regime would survive a U.S. assault, hence the decision not to torch the oil fields.
"Even with U.S. tanks crossing the Iraqi border, an internal revolt remained Saddam's biggest fear," the report concludes.
But perhaps the most interesting parts of the report show just how dysfunctional and twisted the regime's internal workings had become. The culture of fear was so complete that Saddam's underlings routinely lied to him about almost everything, including the capabilities of his own military forces. Advisers would deliver reports of exaggerated military prowess and fanciful technological innovation, rather than face the potential consequences of failure. Saddam would then create military plans based on these imaginary capabilities that his generals would never dare to correct or bother to implement.
By the end, Saddam trusted only himself.
"After 1991 Saddam's confidence in his military commanders steadily eroded, while his confidence in his own abilities as a military genius strengthened," the study says. Indeed, Saddam grew so paranoid about coups that he tended to be most suspicious about those in his most capable security units. In other words, while U.S. officials worried that elite units like the Special Republican Guard would be the toughest opponents, Saddam had weakened and demoralized them over the years because they were in the best position to overthrow him. In the final days of the regime, with U.S. tanks in the Baghdad suburbs, Saddam remained so detached from reality that he was issuing orders to deploy units that had already been destroyed by U.S. firepower.
What becomes clear in this report is that the absence of any logic behind most of the regime's actions and decisions does help explain why the conclusions of U.S. (and other western) intelligence agencies were so off base. In the final months leading up to the war, Saddam ordered his commanders to cooperate fully with United Nations weapons inspectors and get rid of any illegal materials at former weapons sites. But this effort to cooperate was interpreted by U.S. intelligence agencies as yet another attempt to conceal his WMD program and became the centerpiece of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations.
After years of maintaining a deliberate ambiguity over whether he had WMD (to the point where even many senior Iraqi officials doubted Saddam's claim that they had all been destroyed), Saddam's own scheming proved to be his undoing.